Draft status — 29 April 2026
This page is an initial draft. Contributors are invited to improve it with evidence, counterexamples, sector-specific nuance, and practical guidance. The purpose is not to dismiss the practices below, but to right-size their importance relative to the factors that most strongly drive project outcomes.
This wiki does not argue that planning, methods, tools, reports, risk registers, certification, or governance artefacts are useless.
Most of them are useful. Some are essential. A project with no planning, no control, no competent delivery discipline, and no shared way of working is unlikely to perform well.
The argument is narrower and more important:
These practices are often treated as if they are the main drivers of project success, when the evidence suggests they are mostly necessary but not sufficient.
They help projects organise work, coordinate people, monitor delivery, and maintain discipline. But they do not, by themselves, ensure benefits are realised. They do not substitute for clear goals, active sponsorship, commitment, issue-raising culture, good governance, or competent leadership.
Use this page as a caution against misplaced emphasis. The question is not “should we do these things?” The question is “are we mistaking them for the things that actually determine outcomes?”
Academic Literature - project management and project success
The broader literature identifies dozens of project success factors. Radujković et al. (2021), for example, report more than 47 factors associated with project success across different studies, sectors, and definitions of success.
This page does not try to list all 47 individually. That would make the wiki more comprehensive, but less useful. Many of the factors can be grouped into recurring families: